Feds: Peter W. North One of Nation's Biggest Kiddie Porners

WASHINGTON - A computer specialist for the Department of Homeland Security was arrested Thursday for being one the nation’s most prolific disseminators of child pornography.

After a months-long investigation, FBI agents tracked Peter W. North to his home in Alexandria where they discovered 80 gigabytes — the equivalent of 25,000 pictures or 250 hours of video on your iPod — of child pornography in an external hard drive, according to a sworn statement by FBI agent Chad J. Gallagher.

North had come to Gallagher’s attention after the agent reviewed a list of the “most prolific offerors of apparent child pornography in the United States” that had been pieced together by a Wyoming-based federal task force. Working with Comcast, North’s Internet provider, Gallagher was able to use an Internet Protocol address assigned to North to find his home.

The Wyoming task force’s review of activity at North’s IP address between Dec. 10 and March 11 showed that the address was connected to more than 600 files containing child pornography, Gallagher wrote. Between March 27 and June 23, another 375 files were linked to the address.

Agents who preliminarily reviewed the hard drive found in North’s home Thursday believe some of the images, both still and motion, depicted a pre-pubescent girl engaged in sexually explicit activities in North Carolina who matched information provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that led investigators to believe she had been moved across state lines, Gallagher wrote.

North wasn’t home during the search, but Gallagher went to his office in Vienna where North worked as “a contractor for IBM providing information technology services to the Department of Homeland Security.”

While meeting in North’s office, North allegedly told Gallagher that he was the only person with access to the computer and that agents would find the child pornography on the external drive. North, according to the affidavit, used terms, including “pthc,” or pre-teen hard core, to search for the images on peer-to-peer programs like the popular LimeWire to download child pornography.

North reportedly told agents that his wife and adoptive minor daughter live in the Philippines and that he has a computer science degree from Oxford University. He is being held in the Alexandria Adult Detention Center and will have a bond hearing at 2 p.m. today.

Representatives from IBM, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment. Rachel Martin, the federal public defender assigned to North, also declined to comment.